Motor City yearning

Alex Winston is Detroit’s latest musical export, but there’s far more to the diffuse strands of her music than just Motown

‘I’ve been doing this so long that I’m a kind of musical control freak’: Winston (Dan Smyth)

T
here are many possible reactions to Alex Winston’s music, which captures the
Detroit singer and multi-instrumentalist’s diverse musical background and
fuses the different strands into a whole that is thrillingly unpredictable
and fiendishly difficult to categorise. Yet one reaction clamours above the
rest: that the six songs on her debut mini-album, Sister Wife (the title
track of which is her forthcoming single), represent her; that they have
not, in other words, been through the type of filter that dilutes the work
of so many new artists. Winston, who has packed a lot into her 23 years,
including a spell in a hard-rock band that opened for the pro-gun,
right-wing Detroit metal man and firebrand Ted Nugent on tour, is clearly a
musician with an uncompromising approach.

Pity, then, the Michigan producer who called her, enthusing about her songs,
and suggested a meeting. “So I go over to his house,” the